Unification Church: Why Are UN Special Rapporteurs Not Allowed to Visit Japan?
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Several different Rapporteurs have been prevented from going to Japan and examine the religious liberty and human rights situation there.
By Willy Fautré
April 2, 2025
Japan remains deaf to repeated visit requests of several UN Special Rapporteurs in the shadow of the case of the Unification Church, which now officially calls itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. The dissolution of the church was ordered on March 25 in first degree by the Tokyo District Court after a government request spurred by the 2022 assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe.
On 14 January 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Nicolas Levrat, sent a reminder to Tokyo, which remained unanswered. His first request was dated 5 February 2024.
On 20 December 2024, Ashwini K.P., UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, had also sent a reminder that had remained unanswered.
On 28 March 2024, Nazila Ghanea, Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, sent an invitation request, which one year later remains unanswered.
In 2011, Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) carried out a first field mission in Japan and a second one in 2012 to collect testimonies of members of the Unification Church who had been kidnapped and privately imprisoned for weeks, months, and even years in total impunity by members of their families opposed to their conversion to the said church. In the aftermath of this investigation, HRWF published a damning report of 116 pages titled “Japan Abduction and Deprivation of Freedom for the Purpose of Religious De-conversion” which can be obtained through Amazon. For decades, thousands of testimonies of forced recanting of religion were collected but the judiciary dismissed all the complaints under the pretext that it was a “family matter.” Justice was systematically denied to the numerous members of the Unification Church who were victims of abduction and forced confinement by private persons, domestic violence and psychological torture, brainwashing and forceful de-conversion. Moreover, the perpetrators were never prosecuted.
The most serious case was the one of Toru Goto abducted and kept in confinement for 12 years and 5 months by several members of his family with some accomplices. In January 2011, he filed a civil lawsuit against his jailers: close relatives, a Christian pastor, and an “anti-cult” activist involved in his confinement. In September 2015, the Supreme Court confirmed the High Court ruling, ordering the defendants to pay 22 million yen in damages. This unique ruling had a deterrent effect on many opponents to the Unification Church and afterwards the number of abduction and confinement for forced de-conversion dropped dramatically. The number of victims could have been drastically limited from the beginning if Japan’s judiciary had taken its responsibility and had served justice.
Jehovah’s Witnesses were also affected by the phenomenon of family abduction and confinement for forced de-conversion, but to a lesser extent, about 200 cases.
The full HRWF report was presented at the 111th Session of the UN Human Rights Council.
In the aftermath of this report, the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, Mutuma Ruteere, sent an invitation request in 2013 which was never answered.
On 25 March 2025, the Tokyo District Court ordered the dissolution of the Family Federation in Japan.
After the killing of Shinzo Abe media and opponents highlighted some ideological and political proximity between the South Korea-based anti-communist church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party.
The church had been granted legal status as a religious organization in Japan in 1968, when it was at the forefront of an anti-communist popular movement supported by Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.
The prosecution of the Unification Church was obviously politically motivated as an opportunity to damage the party of Shinzo Abe. At the same time, Communist actors and counter-cultist Protestant movements united their efforts to get rid of a church that was anti-Communist right from its inception and was disturbing their own agendas. Late Reverend Sun Myung Moon founded the church in Seoul in 1954, a year after the end of the Korean War. He spent his life preaching conservative and family-oriented values. He died in 2012.
Tetsuya Yamagami, the man who killed Shinzo Abe, resented the church and made it responsible for his family’s financial troubles allegedly due to his mother’s disproportionate donations to the church. He also blamed Shinzo Abe whom he perceived as supporting the church.
The charges against the Unification Church included manipulative fundraising and recruitment tactics that allegedly sowed fear among followers and harmed their families.
The church acknowledged excessive donations, but said the problem had lessened since the group stepped up compliance in 2009 and by 2022 had almost disappeared.
The Unification Church is the third religious group to face a dissolution order under Japan’s civil code but the first dissolved on the basis of civil torts only. Noteworthy is that the church as such and its leaders and executives have never before been found guilty in a single criminal case.
Quite a number of scholars in religious studies, international human rights lawyers, and organizations defending freedom of religion or belief have criticized the ruling of the Tokyo District Court, considering the dissolution disproportionate, based on ill-founded arguments, including on falsified written statements, and manipulated statistics, as the French lawyer Patricia Duval wrote in details in an article entitled “Japan and the Unification Church: False Figures Supported the Dissolution” published by “Bitter Winter.”
They think that Japan’s refusal to ignore repeated visit requests of UN Special Rapporteurs is meant to avoid criticism by the United Nations about the judicial management of the Unification Church and other cases.
The revocation of the church’s legal status means it will lose its tax-exempt privilege, and its assets will be given to a liquidator. If the Unification Church loses on appeal later this year, the decision will become immediately enforceable with dramatic consequences:
all the assets, including the donations made by the members for religious, humanitarian and other projects, will be transferred to a liquidator;
all the buildings of the Unification Church will also be transferred to a liquidator;
the members of the church will lose their places of worship.
This may be compared to the dissolution of Jehovah’s Witnesses by the Russian Federation in 2017, when it was declared an extremist organization.
It is easy to understand that Japan does not want to open its doors to several UN Special Rapporteurs. This is the new battlefield that defenders of freedom of religion must now prioritize because in Asia there is no Venice Commission, a mechanism of the 46 member states of the Council of Europe to check the conformity of national draft laws with international standards, and there is no continental court like the European Court of Human Rights.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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